Tuesday, May 27, 2008

The deception continues. Only the target of this obdurate, mindless deception remains somewhat unclear.

Despite facing one more of the almost countless successive defeats over the last two years, the Congress party is not only continuing to play ostrich, it is even trying to fool the people, with the help of some sections of the English media, into believing that no blame can be laid on the doorstep of the Family. In fact, the party’s defeat in the recently held Karnataka Assembly elections is once again being attributed to the same sick stereotyped falsehoods which have got the party into the mess that it finds itself in today.

Former Chief Minister SM Krishna was brought back a little before the elections from the comforts of the Raj Bhawan in Mumbai to bolster the prospects of the Congress. He was, however neither given a clear hand before the elections nor assigned a concrete post poll responsibility. He has, nevertheless, gracefully accepted the responsibility for letting the BJP get a historic victory in South India, its first ever. No national ‘leader’ of the party has said anything even remotely similar.

Look at the reasons being trotted out for the defeat of the party. Successful caste combination worked out by the BJP, rising inflation, invisible sympathy for the BJP due to the manner on which the JD(S) had betrayed it, poor management and lack of preparation by state leaders, organisational lethargy, policy paralysis of the Manmohan Singh government, lack of community specific leaders, the new delimitation of constituencies, failure to project a leader etc. Have you not heard them all before - plus some more - irrespective of where the election has been fought, whether for state assemblies or the Lok Sabha?

What are all these xeroxed excuses ominously silent about? You guessed it: the Gandhis, Sonia and Rahul. Not even a tiny speck of blame on them for perhaps the longest unbroken string of electoral flops in the history of India. On the contrary, even in this dismal defeat, the party has found something with which it thinks it can deceive God-knows-who about the stellar contribution made by Rahul Gandhi.

What does a headline in The Times of India of May 27, 2008 say? ‘Though Cong failed, Rahul made mark’! Congress leaders and the media which carried the news without any analysis want everyone to believe that Rahul Gandhi was the only redeeming feature of the party’s performance in Karnataka as he achieved a better ‘strike rate’ than his party. Of the 54 constituencies that he campaigned in, the Congress emerged victorious in 22, a 42 per cent success rate, compared to the overall 36 per cent of the Congress which won 80 out of 224.

Of course, no one will want you to know that the campaign trail of Rahul Gandhi was carefully planned to cover only those constituencies where the Congress had the best chances of winning in the first place. Despite that, his strike rate is just six percent more than the state average. Dissect it further and it will be clear that he actually made zero, if not negative, impact in the constituencies he campaigned in. Of course the party would also like no one to remember that the impact of campaigning by real leaders is not limited only to the constituencies they visit. That fact would have been pushed down your throat had the Congress won!

But, Congressmen are not amenable to any truthful analysis if it shows the Family in less than favourable light. Remember Gujarat elections? They had become virtually a straight fight between Narendra Modi and Sonia Gandhi. Had the Congress won, after the most intense campaign ever against a sitting Chief Minister by almost everyone who was someone, it would have been proclaimed as a resounding vote of the people of the whole of India for the outstanding leadership of Sonia Gandhi. In the event, Modi’s unprecedented victory was dismissed as little more than the result of communal politics of hatred.

Go a little further back. In the last general elections, the NDA failed to hit the winning post, thanks solely to the DMK’s last minute switch to the opposite camp and the unexpected results in multi-corned UP. Despite there being no mandate at all for the Congress, senior party leaders swamped the media hailing the verdict as a victory for the leadership, vision – pick a few more adjectives – of Sonia Gandhi.

Poor Prime Minister Manmohan Singh (mms). He was kept away from campaigning in Karnataka by the caucus which is paranoid about any leader outside the family claiming credit for any electoral success. For the first time since Independence, a PM gave just one election speech and that too, hold your breath, not to the public but to a small select gathering in an auditorium! First the party reduces the PM to the equivalent of a short, adult mms clip, meant to be viewed only in private, lest the masses hear him speak about his performance as PM and get to know the person in him first hand. And then, when the party loses, it immediately puts the blame on him for significantly contributing to the defeat by leading a paralysed government!

One more example of the pervasive deception and delusion being created by the Congress. A headline on the front page of The Times of India of May 26, 2008 shouts that the Congress still has a higher vote share in Karnataka. Read on and you will find that what is being concealed is far more significant than what the headline wants you to believe. The overall vote share of the Congress, as per figures of the Election Commission, is now 34.6 per cent against the BJP’s 33.9 per cent. But, and this is what is really significant, while the BJP has increased its share by 5.6 per cent, the Congress’ share has declined by 0.7 per cent! The BJP has gained at the expense of all parties and others, a fact that should be ringing loud alarm bells in everybody’s camp; the headline though will make you believe otherwise.

Another similarly misleading headline in the same newspaper screams that the Congress will edge out the BJP in the Lok Sabha elections if the Karnataka poll results are replicated! If you are one of the many who just skim political news in the newspaper, you will not be wrong in concluding that the Congress, despite the defeat, has done well, thanks mainly to the campaigning carried out by Rahul Gandhi, and that the party is well on its way to winning the next general elections!

It is indeed surprising that such deceptions continue to be inflicted by the Congress party through a friendly media time after time. Whom does it help? Not the Congress party for sure. Whom does it influence? Not the voter for sure too!

The only people who can gain from this mindless exercise are the rootless midgets in the Congress whose only basis for political existence, power, fame and money is the Nehru-Gandhi family. Any lessening in the unquestioned supremacy and unchallenged leadership of Sonia and Rahul Gandhi will be disastrous, even politically fatal, for them. So, they have to keep working harder and harder to ensure that the totally entrenched power centres and the stifling hierarchy of the Congress are protected at all costs.

That in doing so they are killing the party and everything that democracy stands for is of no concern to them. This is exactly what happened unnoticed to communism across Europe before it cracked into unrecognisable pieces all of a wholly unexpected sudden and disappeared from the continent before you knew what happened.

The Congress is in the throes of the same terminal disease. The sicker it gets, the more ludicrous get the deceptions and the falsehoods to protect the turfs of the powerful lot of nobodies whose only source of life is the Nehru-Gandhi family. In the process they are unwittingly harming not just the Family but are also hastening their own destruction by striking at the very roots of the party that given them all that they have.

Had any real leaders been left in the Congress, things would have been different. But, had things been different, they would not have left and the Congress would not have been a one family party, with the Family above and beyond reach of the party whose decline into oblivion seems to be clearly gathering momentum at an alarming rate.